How it works

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-Ryan

Animals are very good at eating plants and
turning them into high-quality protein –
that’s why animal protein has been a part of
the human diet for well over a million years.

Not all sources of protein are equally bioavailable to the body. Nutrition experts have developed ways to quantify protein quality. According to the most common method, the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), only three proteins have a “perfect” score: milk protein, egg protein, and soy protein. (Proteins can also be blended to achieve a higher level of quality, such as combining pea and rice protein.)

In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recommended replacing PDCAAS with a new method, the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS). In short, DIAAS looks at how much protein makes it through to the end of your digestive tract without being used by the body, while PDCAAS is a cruder estimate across the entire digestive tract.

But it turns out that microflora – tiny
things like yeast and bacteria that are too
small to be seen without a microscope –
can produce much more protein relative
to their body size.

You’ve probably heard of “flora and fauna” – the words for the collective plant and animal species, respectively, found in a specific biome. The word “microflora” started being used a few decades ago in the contexts of medicine (e.g., to describe the bacteria and other organisms living in the digestive tract) and agronomy (e.g., the bacteria and other organisms living in soil).

Today, a variety of endeavors are underway across the world to harness fermentation to produce new kinds of food, materials and medicines – they may use bacteria, yeast, fungi, or algae, but qualitatively, they all follow essentially the same story outlined on this page. Since the similarities are far more important than the differences, we’ve found it helpful to talk about microflora, or flora for short, as a catch-all term for any microorganism cultivated by humans to make a product.

If you’re curious, Perfect Day’s first protein is produced in a type of fungi (more on that below).

The power of
fermentation

For centuries, we’ve relied on enzymatic proteins made by flora to
produce leavened bread, to convert the sugar in grapes to wine,
and of course, to turn milk into products like cheese and yogurt.

This idea of harnessing flora to produce better food and drink is
called fermentation, and has been part of human culture longer
than the concepts of writing or money.

Bread:
Yeast + sugar -> carbon dioxide bubbles -> leavened bread.

Wine and beer:
Yeast + sugar -> alcohol (and carbon dioxide, which is why beer and some wines are effervescent).

We now had the milk protein genes in a form
that could be read by any cell. What kind of
cell should we work with? Just like cows are
the best milk producers in the animal world,
it turns out there was a winner from the
world of microflora, too.

60 years ago, on the Solomon Islands, a
natural microflora was discovered that
was able to produce a huge amount of
protein, and was a particularly good
“reader” of genes.

Today, this friendly flora, known asTrichoderma, is one of the top
performers in the bioproducts industry.

It seemed like a no-brainer for us to
work with the same time-tested winner.

Specifically, it was discovered producing enzymes that allowed it to eat through canvas and other materials made of cellulose.